Like Wikileaks founder Assange, the late Henning Mankell was profoundly hostile to all Western governments. The most Western being the US, he hated that country the most with the possible exception of Israel. It must have been very threatening to Mankell's belief system when the evidence unmistakably demonstrated that the ancient enemy Russia was as great a threat to Sweden today as in the time of Czar Peter the Great while America and the NATO alliance was his country's friend and protector.
Against the backdrop of Kurt Wallander's early onset Alzheimer's Syndrome-- resulting, in the previous episode, in his suspension for leaving his pistol behind in a restaurant--this episode's plot is a pathetic fantasy about the Soviet submarines that violated Swedish territorial waters being actually American submarines and collusion between the Swedish armed forces and the C.I.A. to destabilize the government of then prime minister Olof Palme.
Inasmuch as one of the submarines actually ran aground very near Sweden's main naval base (the celebrated "Whiskey on the Rocks" affair) with the captain and crew detained, the absurdity of the plot here is easy to see but hard to forgive.
Review of The Troubled Man
